CIRES researcher helps ecologists with pioneering technology
Field biologists tend to collect fascinating stories. The time a gorilla charged. The time someone stepped on a wasps' nest. That harrowing flight to the research station.
It can be difficult to keep tabs on living things, particularly when they live in very remote areas, yet doing so is often critical for conservation decisions. CIRES scientist Betsy Weatherhead is helping NOAA use unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), originally developed for military use, to meet NOAA's mission involving ecology of ice seals in the Arctic. The seals—ringed, ribbon, spotted, and bearded—all fall under NOAA's protection, and they each rely in some way on floating patches of sea ice—for breeding, foraging, or to escape predators. That makes the animals potentially vulnerable to climate change, which is whittling away at Arctic sea ice. And it makes the seals difficult to study, Weatherhead said. "Seals occur over vast areas of the Arctic, and accessing these areas safely is challenging using current vessel-based and aerial survey technologies."
So Weatherhead and several other NOAA colleagues, including Robyn Angliss, Deputy Director of NOAA's National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, Washington, spearheaded the development and support of a project to send a UAS over sea ice, to see if the technique could be used to identify ice seals and monitor populations.
In May and June of 2009, years of planning culminated in the launching of a Scan Eagle UAS, with a 10-foot wingspan, from the NOAA vessel MacArthur II in the Bering Sea west of Alaska. The UAS, which is owned by the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and operated by Greg Walker, carried a video camera and a digital still camera, which captured about 25,000 images during 10 flights over sea ice in the Bering Sea.
Viewed from 300 feet above the surface, a ribbon seal can look like a shadow, or a of ice, and the sheer number of images that require processing is daunting. Now, puddle of dark water on a light-colored floe Weatherhead and her colleagues are
The Science
Physicists and
ecologists team up
to use unmanned
aircraft to study
remote Arctic ice and
the creatures that call
it home.
they obtained. They're beginning to talk with image processing companies—groups that write face recognition software, for example—to help pick out seals from shadow.
The researchers have pored through enough of the images to know that they will be useful, Angliss said. "We have been impressed by the quality of the digital still
images," said Angliss. "Based ontrying to figure out how to quickly and automatically retrieve data from the images preliminary review, we can determine ice seal species, relative age, and gender for some ice seal species. This technology may be useful in the future to monitor ice seal populations across the Arctic."
Occasionally, it's possible to learn even more about the seals' environment. "In some images collected using UAS in other parts of the Arctic, you can see the footprints of polar bears," Weatherhead said. Weatherhead, an atmospheric physicist who studies climate change and variability, especially in the Arctic, said she's delighted to be working closely with population biologists on the project.
"Here we have ecologists counting animals and physicists studying sea ice in the same places," Weatherhead said. "It's terrific to be working together on these same images." 
